by Mirae P.
My husband came back home after picking my mom up from the airport. It was a beautiful sunny day. She always liked the weather in California whenever she visited. My son ran up to his grandmother and gave her a big hug. I cooked dinner while she was unpacking her luggage. Lots of talk, laughs, and delicious food filled our house that night.
A few days later, we put all the ingredients we bought from the Korean market for making kimchi in our front yard. It was about 35 to 40 cabbages and 15 large Korean radishes as main ingredients. And also, we prepared other ingredients like onions, scallions, and chili powder, etc.
It took a while to salt and wash all the cabbages. We had a great family time while we made kimchi. It took nearly two days to finish making kimchi. It was quite a generous amount for us. We could eat more than a year. As a final step, we put all the kimchi into the kimchi container and stored them in a kimchi refrigerator (a special refrigerator designed only for kimchi storage and it helps a fermentation process.). Kimchi tastes different everyday from its fermentation. One-month and six-months old kimchi taste totally different. And most Koreans enjoy the different flavors of kimchi as well as various types of recipes.
Finally we are all done with kimchi and we got excited after we loaded up our kimchi refrigerator full of kimchi. I was so grateful that my mom got to visit and help us have delicious, fresh kimchi.
About two weeks later, my mom and I went to the kimchi refrigerator which was in the garage, to check the kimchi, and…it was all FROZEN!!!! Everything was completely frozen up and was one whole block of kimchi. We could tell that it was ruined. We didn’t realize that the refrigerator was broken before—TOO LATE—it was broken from age.
It is very sunny today. But I just want to bring back my snowy memory of the time when my mom was getting kimchi from jang-dok-dae (a large clay pot). I think convenient technology can’t beat humans!